Speech Recognition, Getting Closer to Mainstream

As an individual who prefers the spoken word over the written word, I have been longing for the day when I could have my eloquent phrases automatically turned into flowing text.  When working on my master’s thesis a few years back, I purchased iListen for Mac in hopes of typing less.  After 5 or 6 attempts, I gave up.  Too much trouble.  But, in the technology industry, a few years makes a lot of difference.

In the WSJ article “Get Ready to Speak to Your Phone — and Be Understood” Ben Rooney gives us an update on the technology. The company that has been behind the technology all along, Nuance, is still the one making technological advances.  (Nuance – NASDAQ: NUAN closed at 20.32 today, near the 52-week high of 20.97).  The Nuance technology is behind Dragon Naturally Speaking, GM’s OnStar, and many mobile phone’s predictive text.

I did just a bit of research and discovered that the first speech recognition technology came from IBM in 1961 — the IBM Shoebox.  It was literally the size of a shoe box and had nine lights.  As you spoke a digit 0-9, the corresponding light would shine. Now we are accustomed to basic speech recognition for voice dialing, call routing, and simple data entry, such as credit card numbers.  Windows Vista added Windows Speech Recognition, though it is positioned as “Accessibility Technology.”  Let me know if you have used this technology on a daily basis, and if so, what you think of it.

I am ready for speech recognition to be mainstream.  I imagine telling instead of typing this blog.  I imagine explaining an entire problem to an automated tech support line and getting a relevant answer.  What do you imagine?  How long will we have to wait?

Technology Can Be Turned Off

Technology can be turned off. That is a reminder from Sherry Turkle director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self from a USA Today article, “2010: The year technology replaced talking“.  According to the article “Americans are connected at unprecedented levels — 93% now use cellphones or wireless devices; one-third of those are “smartphones” that allow users to browse the Web and check e-mail, among other things. The benefits are obvious: checking messages on the road, staying in touch with friends and family, efficiently using time once spent waiting around. The downside: Often, we’re effectively disconnecting from those in the same room.”

Just like any other tool, these technology devices that help us communicate and share information with anyone, anywhere, anytime, are only as effective as the tool user.  Sometimes we forget that we are in control.  Yes, we can turn off the devices.  Yes, we can use them to be more efficient and fun when we want or need them.  But, they do not need to degrade the quality of our communication with other humans.  Used well, they can increase the quality of our communication with others.  It is only when we forget that they can be turned off or ignored that it becomes a problem.  And, that is a human problem not a technology problem.